Part 2 of 4
Part one , part three , part four
In my last post HERE I quoted excerpts from Rust Reno's essay on Nietzsche, who not only lambasts Christianity’s slave morality but also mocks his naive atheist enlightenment readers, with their equally superstitious modern illusions of objectivity, a naive belief we can redirect our lives and our culture on the basis of rational analysis and well-intentioned judgment, their naive worship of “Reason” (with a capital R, God must go somewhere), their pious moral demands we must search and uphold objective knowledge. Modern atheism is nothing but a heretical, and particularly hypocritical, Christian sect. Here I continue the conversation.
As John Gary points out in his new book on Atheism,
“…much modern Western thought is a bastardized and degenerated version of Christianity, cherry picking the anthropological and ethical fruit while hacking away at its metaphysical roots. “The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity – the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self–realisation in history.”
“A remark made by Wittgenstein about Frazer applies equally to Richard Dawkins and his followers,” he notes: “‘Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages… His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves’.” (11) Not only do the “smears and fulminations” of the New Atheists make sense “only in a specifically Christian context,” but they only do so within “a few subsets of the Christian religion”.
Stephen RL Clark writes about the specifically Christian type of atheism he claims is a Christian sect HERE, one particular to modernity, :
“Epicurean philosophers were considered atheistical – although they clearly stated that all the usual gods existed, somewhere in the infinite expanse of being – because they rejected the usual cultic rituals. It is no accident that ‘atheism’ has often been considered anti-social (as both Christians and Epicureans were), since the rituals that atheists rejected were ones that validated the existing social order. But of course those atheists often had their own ideas about what social order to create or to preserve – they had, in short, gods and a cult of their own, and once they won through to power themselves they imposed the cult on other people with almost as much ferocity as ever was used against them!
Those who don’t believe in, or don’t worship, the gods of a particular tribe may still have gods, ideals and rituals of their own.
Abrahamic theism in its various guises - gives us a reason for valuing truth, and for thinking that it is, in the end, coherent and such as we can at least in part conceive. A.O.Lovejoy spoke of ‘the inexpugnable faith of humankind’: that there really is a truth which is not dependent on our wishes or our reasonings, and that this truth is nonetheless attainable - in part - by those who follow the right way.
R.M.Rorty rejected both ideas as absurd….he was merely applying the logic of current naturalistic, evolutionary theory. Current evolutionary theory on the other hand suggests that we are likely to believe only what will be socially and reproductively useful (and that is therefore all we should do): the Muslims perhaps calculated accordingly that it would do them no good to let themselves be infected by a socially disadvantageous meme.
Robert Chambers, gives a theistic account of nature :
“The objective structure of the universe and the intellectual structure of the human being coincide; the subjective reason and the objectified reason in nature are identical. In the end it is ‘one’ reason that links both and invites us to look to a unique creative Intelligence.”
The success, so far, of rational enquiry does not prove that this is true: we can never be sure that we have read the signs correctly, or that the very next moment will not reveal that the pattern of events has been entirely other than we supposed. Even our notion of what counts as a resemblance, or what will count as ‘doing the same thing’, has no basis in any merely logical understanding. Even in working out mathematical formulas, though we cannot prove that we are on the right track, we may still hope we are, and continue – there being no rational alternative – in faith: a faith that is much more reasonable on theistic principles than atheistic.
It was from the perspective of Judeo-Christian theism – and from that perspective alone – that it was predictable that science would have succeeded as it has. Without the faith in the rational intelligibility of the world and the divine vocation of human beings to master it, modern science would never have been possible, and, even today, the continued rationality of the enterprise of science depends on convictions that can be reasonably grounded only in theistic metaphysics."
"We have to psychoanalyze science, purify it. . . . Its concept of Nature is often only an idol to which the scientist makes sacrifices, the reasons for which are due more to affective motivations than to scientific givens. "
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Nature”
How is this thing, this Newtonian phantasm . . . this Natural Religion, this impossible absurdity?
—William Blake, “Milton”
Of course a self-sustaining, closed nature is logically impossible, nature requires a “super-nature.
As David Hart remarks,
Naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range. The one thing of which it can give no account, and which its most fundamental principles make it entirely impossible to explain at all, is nature’s very existence. For existence is most definitely not a natural phenomenon; it is logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever…. In fact, it is impossible to say how, in terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all.
There is, after all, nothing inherently reasonable in the conviction that all of reality is simply an accidental confluence of physical causes, without any transcendent source or end. Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other.”
…an incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking.”
In MacIntyre’s words:
"To believe in God is not to believe that in addition to nature, about which atheists and theists can agree, there is something else, about which they disagree. It is rather that theists and atheists disagree about nature as well as about God. For theists believe that nature presents itself as radically incomplete, as requiring a ground beyond itself, if it is to be intelligible, and so their disagreement with atheists involves everything."
Clarke continues,
"We cannot explain existence as a whole by referring to some one thing that happens also to exist. Either there is no explanation (things ‘just happen’) or it lies – as Plato said – beyond existence. But though there is a disagreement here about the nature of ‘Nature’ itself, it may still be true that theists of this stamp will prefer a ‘naturalistic’ reading of our evidence.
Naturalism, the thesis that the cosmos works according to its own internal rules without being constantly reset or interfered with by its transcendent creator, was a theological doctrine in its beginnings, and there is no way of proving that it is true by an empirical enquiry. So also was the Enlightenment decision to neglect ‘final causes’ in our account of what occurs in nature: since we do not know God’s purposes, nor His techniques for realizing them, we should content ourselves with describing what occurs, and trusting to our rational – and God-given – insight to uncover useful patterns. Christians also explicitly rejected animism, and so provided the spokesmen of experimental science with their characteristic rhetoric."
"We cannot explain existence as a whole by referring to some one thing that happens also to exist. Either there is no explanation (things ‘just happen’) or it lies – as Plato said – beyond existence. But though there is a disagreement here about the nature of ‘Nature’ itself, it may still be true that theists of this stamp will prefer a ‘naturalistic’ reading of our evidence.
Naturalism, the thesis that the cosmos works according to its own internal rules without being constantly reset or interfered with by its transcendent creator, was a theological doctrine in its beginnings, and there is no way of proving that it is true by an empirical enquiry. So also was the Enlightenment decision to neglect ‘final causes’ in our account of what occurs in nature: since we do not know God’s purposes, nor His techniques for realizing them, we should content ourselves with describing what occurs, and trusting to our rational – and God-given – insight to uncover useful patterns. Christians also explicitly rejected animism, and so provided the spokesmen of experimental science with their characteristic rhetoric."
And Hart asks,
“Why presume that the scientific image is true while the manifest image is an illusion when, after all, the scientific image is a supposition of reason dependent upon decisions regarding methods of inquiry, whereas the manifest image — the world as it exists in the conscious mind — presents itself directly to us as an indubitable, inescapable, and eminently coherent reality in every single moment of our lives? How could one possibly determine here what should qualify as reality as such?
Perhaps the scientific and manifest images are both accurate. Then again, perhaps only the manifest image is. Perhaps the mind inhabits a real Platonic order of being, where ideal forms express themselves in phenomenal reflections, while the scientific image — a mechanistic regime devoid of purpose and composed of purely particulate causes, stirred only by blind, random impulses — is a fantasy, a pale abstraction decocted from the material residues of an immeasurably richer reality.”
“Why presume that the scientific image is true while the manifest image is an illusion when, after all, the scientific image is a supposition of reason dependent upon decisions regarding methods of inquiry, whereas the manifest image — the world as it exists in the conscious mind — presents itself directly to us as an indubitable, inescapable, and eminently coherent reality in every single moment of our lives? How could one possibly determine here what should qualify as reality as such?
Perhaps the scientific and manifest images are both accurate. Then again, perhaps only the manifest image is. Perhaps the mind inhabits a real Platonic order of being, where ideal forms express themselves in phenomenal reflections, while the scientific image — a mechanistic regime devoid of purpose and composed of purely particulate causes, stirred only by blind, random impulses — is a fantasy, a pale abstraction decocted from the material residues of an immeasurably richer reality.”
"Some atheists," Clarke goes on to say, "it seems safe to conclude, wish to deny that the world is packed with fairies, spirits, ghosts and goblins: at the very least our fantasies and fears do not themselves have any direct effect on the way things work. They may wish that the world be governed by ‘natural law’ (that is, that it go on doing ‘the same thing’, whatever that may be) or by the operation of ‘physical nature’, and fear what they take to be the implication of a robust theism: that natural law and the present nature of the things they deal with could suddenly be suspended.
The principles that good atheists wish to see applied - reason, science and the power of the human mind – are ones that they have imbibed from two millennia of Hebrew and Hellenic culture. The criticisms that they mount against ‘religion’ – that religious people have persecuted minority opinions, bullied unbelievers, humiliated women, waged war against the infidel and so forth – make little sense as criticisms rather than observations if there is no transcendent standard of behaviour and motivation of the sort we learnt from that supposedly wicked book Leviticus
Atheistical critics, especially the most vociferous, are, I suggest, motivated by a passionate attachment to ideas of truth and justice that depend historically and logically on mainstream Abrahamic theism – perhaps especially its Christian variety.
The demand that we be ‘objective’ is, exactly, a moral demand.
If the Truth is not worth knowing, and we have no reason to expect that we have the power to know it even if it were, then the reasonable decision would be to prefer the fictions."
David Hart remarks that,
“modern science,” in particular, is a distinct culture, with all the historical, linguistic, and conceptual conditionality that this entails; and every culture incubates within itself, even if only tacitly and tenuously, certain metaphysical presuppositions: what, for instance, constitutes reason; what the limits of knowledge are; what questions ought to be asked; which methods of inquiry should be presumed to reflect reality and which should be regarded only as useful fictions. And it is here, at the level of culture, that the truly irreconcilable conflicts between scientific and theological thinking are inevitably found; for in most circumstances it is not what we can prove, but what we presuppose, that determines what we think we know or imagine we have discovered.
After all, the sciences invoke questions not only of physical origins, properties, and processes, but also (even if only indirectly) of their intrinsic intelligibility, rational coherence, and even modal plausibility, which inevitably touch upon questions that classical theology asks as well.
So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a “rational” or “realistic” view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy.”
All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit....
One can, I imagine, consider the nature of reality with genuine probity and conclude that the material order is all there is. One can also, however, and perhaps with better logic, conclude that materialism is a grossly incoherent superstition; that the strict materialist is something of a benighted and pitiable savage, blinded by an irrational commitment to a logically impossible position; and that every “primitive” who looks at the world about him and wonders what god made it is a profounder thinker than the convinced atheist who would dismiss such a question as infantile. One might even conclude, in fact, that one of the real differences between what convention calls the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason is actually the difference between a cogent intellectual and moral culture, capable of considering the mystery of being with some rigor, and a confined and vapid dogmatism without genuine logical foundation."
The principles that good atheists wish to see applied - reason, science and the power of the human mind – are ones that they have imbibed from two millennia of Hebrew and Hellenic culture. The criticisms that they mount against ‘religion’ – that religious people have persecuted minority opinions, bullied unbelievers, humiliated women, waged war against the infidel and so forth – make little sense as criticisms rather than observations if there is no transcendent standard of behaviour and motivation of the sort we learnt from that supposedly wicked book Leviticus
Atheistical critics, especially the most vociferous, are, I suggest, motivated by a passionate attachment to ideas of truth and justice that depend historically and logically on mainstream Abrahamic theism – perhaps especially its Christian variety.
The demand that we be ‘objective’ is, exactly, a moral demand.
If the Truth is not worth knowing, and we have no reason to expect that we have the power to know it even if it were, then the reasonable decision would be to prefer the fictions."
David Hart remarks that,
“modern science,” in particular, is a distinct culture, with all the historical, linguistic, and conceptual conditionality that this entails; and every culture incubates within itself, even if only tacitly and tenuously, certain metaphysical presuppositions: what, for instance, constitutes reason; what the limits of knowledge are; what questions ought to be asked; which methods of inquiry should be presumed to reflect reality and which should be regarded only as useful fictions. And it is here, at the level of culture, that the truly irreconcilable conflicts between scientific and theological thinking are inevitably found; for in most circumstances it is not what we can prove, but what we presuppose, that determines what we think we know or imagine we have discovered.
After all, the sciences invoke questions not only of physical origins, properties, and processes, but also (even if only indirectly) of their intrinsic intelligibility, rational coherence, and even modal plausibility, which inevitably touch upon questions that classical theology asks as well.
So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a “rational” or “realistic” view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy.”
All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit....
One can, I imagine, consider the nature of reality with genuine probity and conclude that the material order is all there is. One can also, however, and perhaps with better logic, conclude that materialism is a grossly incoherent superstition; that the strict materialist is something of a benighted and pitiable savage, blinded by an irrational commitment to a logically impossible position; and that every “primitive” who looks at the world about him and wonders what god made it is a profounder thinker than the convinced atheist who would dismiss such a question as infantile. One might even conclude, in fact, that one of the real differences between what convention calls the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason is actually the difference between a cogent intellectual and moral culture, capable of considering the mystery of being with some rigor, and a confined and vapid dogmatism without genuine logical foundation."
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